Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What If Derrida's Cat Had Been A Dog?

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.... Sometimes I look into a cat's eyes" (Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith [New York, 1958], pp. 96-97).

What If Derrida’s Cat Had Been A Dog?

It seems unlikely that there’s been in the last decade an animal studies-related
conference, dissertation chapter, or anthology during which at some point a speaker or writer doesn’t get around to citing
Derrida’s cat. As a brief refresher, Jacques
Derrida won the adoration of many of ‘the animal people’ [1]with
his now famous paper, ‘The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow).’ First
delivered as a series of lectures at a conference in 1997, they were subsequently
translated from the French into English in a 2008 publication. An examination
on shame and nakedness and language, as well as the humanities themselves,
Derrida’s lengthy essay is most often lauded as a moral meditation on the
complex philosophical stew that comprises human relationships with animals or,
what philosopher Kelly Oliver cites ashis attempt to ‘describe [...] a ‘naked’ encounter with another creature
before or beyond concepts and their names, including male or female.’ (144)

To refresh memories, Derrida’s essay is triggered by an otherwise
ordinary encounter with his own cat, who ‘surprised’ him one day in the
bathroom while he was naked, prompting
him to pose numerous questions, including this concluding one: ‘But cannot this cat also be, deep within her
eyes, my primary mirror?’ (418)

Mirror of what, exactly? And what does the mirror ultimately reflect for the
naked Derrida, who describes being faced ‘with the cat’s eyes looking at me as
it were from head to toe, just to see
. . . in the direction of my sex’? (373)

In the course of his essay, Derrida spends a great deal of time leading us downwell-trodden paths of Biblical
dominion, and the very Western historical and philosophical blindnesses to animals,
from the Cartesian view of automaton, to Bentham’s ‘but can they suffer?’ interrogation
that knocked a dent in old Aristotle’s rational
armor, and otherwise engaging the usual roundup of suspects (read: male,
Western philosophers) like Heidegger,
Levinas, and Lacan in pondering the murky philosophical lines separating Human from Animal Other. So what is new? I
have to agree with other feminists like Carol Adams that the reason Derrida’s essay matters so much--and matters
to the animal people--is very simple. It’s Derrida.
And it is he who in his nothing-short-of-revelation exhorts us to include animals
within our moral consideration. But might we be giving Derrida too much credit
for his cat encounter?

‘I must make it clear from the
start,’ he writes,‘the cat I am
talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t
the figure of a cat.’(375) Emphasis is mine.

Real cat, yes, but an additional detail he adds, which becomes one of the most salient features of the essay, is cast in a brief
adjective clause, almost as an afterthought: ‘The cat that looks at me naked
and that is truly a little cat, this cat I am talking about, which is
also a female . . .’ (375).

Though the gender of the cat never comes into play in the essay, the inclusion of that detail is deliberate and
carefully chosen, and therefore impossible for the reader to overlook. Which is why, despite all his
musings on dominion and otherness and shame, it is troubling that Derrida completely
sidesteps the role of gender(s) (as well as other ‘othernesses’ in his
meditation), regardless of the multiple ways one might read ‘female.’ Philosopher
Lisa Guenther remarks on this glaring oversight, as well, but focuses her
attention more on Derrida’s ‘flirting’
with original sin ‘without fully interrogating its resources for articulating,
and perhaps even disentangling, the relation between the human domination of
animals and men’s domination of women.’ (152)

Is it possible that Derrida’s inability to see beyond himself into the mirror
of the cat’s stare is, in part, a failure for him to move beyond language to take
in more than ‘one otherness’ at a time, despite all of his writings that would
lead one to think just the opposite? Since he acknowledges that the animal ‘has
its point of view regarding me,’ through what embodied and experiential lens
does he understand that ‘point of view,’ and what other multiple points of view
might be reflecting back that he does
not acknowledge? The animal is not just an animal, butan animal who is biologically female in
gender, and an animal who regardless of gender is often associated with women,
femaleness, and the feminine. [2]
Real life delivered Derrida this moment of thoroughly challenged discourse on
not only the Otherness of the animal body and the shame of his own nudity (in
the full Bergerian sense), but on another kind of Otherness, as exemplified by
his cat--the Feminine”--from which Derrida seems to quickly retreat.

Odd that in this literally
eye-opening moment, Derrida is blind to anything but a singular vision of ‘otherness,’
sandwiched between the shame of his human-ness, and the suffering humans
cause to animals. Instead of embracing the numerous intersections (which might
and should include any number of gender, racial, and cultural pressure points),
the animal gaze, as Derrida reads that moment,
becomes a closed self-referential
circuit, leading him back to thinking about
his own human body, apparently oblivious
to the larger implications of his cat’s biological femaleness in relation to
his own maleness. Given that he stands there naked before his cat, mightn’t he have contemplated not only what it means to be human, but presumably what it also means to be a biologically male human body as illuminated through the gaze of the [feminine] cat? Perhaps
it wasthis inextricable link between not just animal Otherness but ‘the otherness of the feminine’ that prompts
the great man to panic and reach for the towel? The very self-consciousness of
his own shame blinds him to true
engagement in a potentially affective moment, which instead turns
phallogocentric, and returns him to himself, his humanity, and ultimately his
maleness. ‘To respond well to his own imperative to behold the animot,’ writes Guenther of Derrida’s
identification with both the hunter Bellerephon and the monstrous hybrid and
very femaleChimera, ‘Derrida would have
to face not only the female non-human animal, but also the female human animal,
the creature whose ambiguous position highlights the impropriety of both man
and animal.’ (161)

As scholar Maneesha Deckha so helpfully reminds us, that gender is not
the only disruption that Derrida can’t seem to face. ‘Race
and culture are deeply imbricated in animal issues and disputes. At a
foundational level, we can see that Western ideas of ‘man’s dominion’ over
animals reflect a deeply gendered and imperial understanding of human
relationships with animals.’ (537) And it is from this imperial understanding
that I believe Derrida, despite his best efforts and sympathies, is ultimately unable
to escape.

Let’s review the rather prosaic events of this Derridean Ur-moment: It’s an
ordinary day Chez Derrida and, as he apparently has done on so many other days,
Derrida steps naked from his shower, where he is discovered there in his bathroom by his little female cat who catches
him nu comme en ver. Shefixes
him in her stare, a stare he’s likely been fixed in numerous times before, but on
this particular day it appears, from his account, to be the first time he takes full notice and actually looks back. And what is it he thinks he sees?

‘Nothing’ Derrida writes, ‘will have ever done more to make me think
through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see
myself naked under the gaze of a cat’ (380).

Many animal scholars repeatedly credit Derrida with animating the cat
beyond symbol to an actively engaged, dialogic presence that spawns his meditation
on imagining, in part, a more dynamic,
reciprocal way of being with animals, challenging the very notion of what it
means to be human. His sway is given impetus by both scholar Cary Wolfe and
philosopher Matthew Calarco who each credits
Derrida, in slightly different ways, for
offering maybe the single most important moment in animal studies to date.[3]And yet the cat, for Derrida, never is
allowed to be fullya catin all her catness, nor does she ever go beyond being a cat, or even
an ‘animot,’ as Derrida designates her.And, just on a practical level, this surprise confrontation between cat and
naked-as-a-jaybird Derrida would perhaps be all too
familiar and habitual to anyone who
shares a life with an inquisitive cat.

Case in point, my household includes two, one in particular, Birdie (a
neutered male), who refuses me, a la
Derrida, even one iota of privacy in the bathroom, and routinely ensconces
himself like a sphinx on the closed toilet seat lid to observe me disarmingly through
shiny gold eyes while I bathe. The whole time I am caught in his enormous,
penetrating stare, so I know well that disconcerting experience of being stared
at by a cat. (If you have to ask why I don’t just close the bathroom door, then
clearly you do not have a cat.)

Philosopher Martin Buber’sown‘becoming-animal’experience with a cat offers a slightly more nuanced
rendering:‘An animal's eyes have the
power to speak a great language.. . . Sometimes I look into a cat's eyes . . .The beginning of this cat’s glance, lighting up under the touch of my
own glance[4],
indisputably questioned me: “Is it possible that you think of me? Do you
really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your
sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that
surrounds me? What is it that comes to me? What is it?” ’ (96-98) [5]

Unlike Buber, Derrida does not go on to explore a private relationship with a
particular cat.And unlike
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, another favorite with ‘the animal people,’ he
does not grapple, albeit clumsily, with any identification of women as the
Other.In fact, as Oliver points out parenthetically,
though ‘. . . he is rebuking both the animal difference and the sexual
difference . . .,’ he does so ‘ (. . . in the problematic way of attributing it
now to a cat rather than to a woman).’ (144) I would add that this is not a
wild cat, but a domesticated companion animal who has lived in proximity to him
for some time.

Perhaps this is a good moment to pose the all too obvious question, which might
go something like this: between daily interactions with his own cat, which
would normally include embodied initimacies, and his knowledge of Buber and Levinas et al.,
what took Derrida so long to notice? The power of one little cat in a fleeting
moment to reverse the binary gaze! A
tectonic shift for Derrida, under the penetrating and powerful stare that leads
to, all pun intended--philosophical pause—but then, oddly, after that, the very real cat is gone.

Lynn Turner refers to ‘. . . the
disappearance of Derrida’s cat from ‘The animal that Therefore I Am,’--a
disappearance hovering between a failure of curiosity and an ethical refusal …
.’(75) She observes, ‘Derrida does not
look in order to cancel the other by seeing his own re-confirmed reflection
(‘pointing’ straight back to him). Rather the response of the other always
surprises.’ (76)

I would posit that had Derrida more readily recognized the implications
of the cat’s femaleness, or at least the importance that femaleness held for
him to mention it to begin with, his essay might have taken a very different turn.
But, in fact, his reading of ‘otherness’ contracts itself into fairly well-trammeledterrainwith little acknowledgement ofthe imbricated ‘othernesses’ informing
one another as signaled by the body of his little cat.Nor does he interrogate the detailthat it is a cat (not a dog, not a wolf, not
a sheep, not a slug, not Nagel’s ‘alien’ bat) that engages his imagination.

At one moment, Derrida starts tosuggest, when he refers to the cat as a ‘chat/chatte,’ whether this
particular cat is female or male is actually beside the point. I would agree, since
cats, regardless of gender, have been, often to their disadvantage, historically
associated with ‘the feminine,’ and‘women,’
and done so quite disparagingly,
particularly in relation to views of women’s sexuality and independence.And as
several scholars have pointed out, the term ‘pussy’ or ‘pussycat’ also doubles
as slang for female genitals, a fact
that is not unique to English. In
addition, the noun for ‘cat’ in several languages, happens to be feminine (does
that make dogs masculine)? The gaze into which Derrida entered into was as much
a power relationship about gender (his and the cat’s) as it was about animality, and the Foucauldian
self-surveillance that ensued was, I argue, precisely that--internalization of
the female gaze upon himself, even if ever so brief. Did he feel preyed upon?
Pinned?Objectified?

So in that moment, Derrida’s
response is toturn away. And in so
doing, he not only seems to forget his very real, female cat, but ignores an entire body of work by leading feminist
thinkers and scholars who have also explored significant connections point between human and nonhuman
animals, and may have furthered his thinking.An excellent example is the one Susan Fraiman chooses as illustration in her recent essay, ‘Pussy Panic,’ the famous encounter
between Barbara Smuts and the primate Damien. Smuts had fallen asleep and
was awakened by a curious baboon who was touching her fingernails. She sat up,
andthey looked at each other, whereupon she, in turn,
examined his fingernails, in a mutual
exchange that she acknowledged as intimacy. In Smuts’ case, and in the cases of
a number of feminist philosophers and thinkers, from Marti Kheel to Donna
Haraway to Carol Adams, encounters with nonhuman animals have involved not only
seeing and then pondering, but mutual, physical
touching and, in Smuts’ case,moving
directly to the realization that both sets of fingernails were so similar and
familiar.But instead of reaching out toward his cat,
Derrida withdraws into his head, and not only from the cat, but from the feminine,
perhaps in a self-protective (or self-centered?) gesture, comforted simply by his
conclusion that the ‘other’ looks back.

But does this somewhat bland observation
really deserve credit for what has so
startled Derrida? And why does he
retreat from all the other signifiers at play? It’s certainly easy to imagine the
kaleidoscopic potential for multiple signifiers launched through the cat’s ‘gazing eyes.’

For example, there’s the cat as representative of the Dark Feminine, both
Creator and Destroyer, and its recurring and powerful role in particularly non-Western
traditions. [6] In both power and intelligence, cats have been traditionally
connected to the mysterious and the supernatural, as well as representations of
home and hearth, motherhood, and female sexual appeal. Witness Bastet of ancient Egyptian myth, with her cat’s head
and woman’s body, and revered role as a household goddess, the protector of
women and children, as well as fertility and birth. Or Egyptian warrior goddess, Sekhmet, depicted as
a lionness who alternately served as a fierce huntress and the bearer of disease and cures.From Japan comes the much worshipped, and luck-inducing Maneki Neko, often featured
as a ceramic statue with the famously raised paw, around whom numerous legends
have collected.

The connection between cats and
female sexuality is complex, and examples abound throughout the centuries in
visual art (most often by male artists) wherein the cat is viewed as a symbol of both wanton
sexuality and manipulation. In her book,
Animal
Motifs in Asian Art, Katherine M. Ball writes, ‘While the cat, with many
nations, has been associated with women, particularly old women, in Japan, the
geisha, ‘singing girl,’ appears to have been selected for this distinction,
doubtless due to the witchery she exercises over the opposite sex.’ (154) In
addition to serving as a force for luck, the Maneki Neko figurine also
symbolizes youthful, female sexuality. In more popular representations, the unrepentant
and unfettered sexuality of female cat protagonists is most humorously exemplified
in Don Marquis’ utterly irreverent and promiscuous alleycat, Mehitabel, whose yearnings for the
independent and unfettered lives of the Tom cats includes her famous lamentation for the
obstacles motherhood poses fora woman
artist, ‘what in hell
have i done to deserve all these kittens?’(66)

The cat’s aloof and diva-esque reputationalso serves as a punchline of many classic cat jokesthat include the following: ‘Dogs believe
they are human; cats believe they are God’; ‘As every cat owner knows, nobody
owns a cat’; ‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff’.But this perceived aspect of feline character
also puts noncompliant, autonomous cats at tremendous risk, as exemplified in
the confession of the young male speaker inCharles Harper Webb’s poem‘Tormenting
the Cat.’

‘Something
about our cat's fastidious/ licking made me want to mess him up. . . ,’ the
speaker confesses, before proceeding to
detail the heightened cruelties of some
of the other boys who actually set cats
on fire. (9) He ends with the recognition that ‘None of us could leave in peace/creatures
so graceful and self-contained,/so indulged and loved by women,/so indifferent
as we writhed in our own flames.’(10)

The male speaker’s conflation of cats with women, even his own cat whom he identifies
as‘he,’ along with his inability to
possess or control the cat, any more than he could a woman, speaks to the young
man’s rising sexual frustration and his inability to control another being.The unadulterated and unapologetic aloofness
of the self-contained cat refusing to
accord them the privilege they expect leaves the speaker and his other male friends ‘writhing
in their own flames,’ and consumed by a desire that remains unsatisfied. The
cat qua woman--untamed and indifferent--a bewitching manifestation of the unattainable,
offering a refusal of masculine of
control.

The association of cats with women of course extends well beyond the
symbolic and, as Derrida acknowledges, he’s squaring off in the bathroom that
day with a very real cat who is also a very real female. In their historic
alignment with ‘women,’ cats have been considered
both friend to and familiar of women associated with magic, sometimes called
witches, a termthat often included
thosewomen who lived alone, or who did
not otherwise conform to traditional gender expectations, or fit neatly under
patriarchal control.Black cats, in
particular, were viewed as actual manifestations of Satan himself. The cats’
association with the occult connects her to the night, the unknowable, the
unholy, and even to mortality. Imbued with mysterious and supernatural powers
cats were believed in many cultures to shapeshift, trick, and deceive,
sometimes even assuming human form and passing as one of us, again a troubling
of any notion of distinct boundaries.

To the list of what confronted Derrida we might addthe ‘noncompliant feminine,’ a characteristic
of human females that can have serious consequences in relations with men and
male partners, and which for cats likewise puts them at risk with
humans.Statistics demonstrate that domestic cats are more likely to be neglected and abused than
their canine counterparts. Neglected because it’s often falsely assumed that
cats are ‘wild’ and can therefore readily survive on their own, if ignored or dumped.
Actual physical abuse often occurs because of that cat’snotorious refusalto follow orders, and the need of the abuser
to control the ‘out of control.’[7]

Female cats, not unlike the fictional Mehitabel, are also reputedly sexually and uncontrollably promiscuous, reproducing at
fast rates with any number of male partners, offering an interesting corollary
to centuries of debate about who controlshuman women’s sexual and reproductive rights. Additionally, cats are
often criticized for being sneaky and
wily,and highly skilled at getting what
they want from humans.In an interesting
study,Karen McComb ofUniversity of Sussex, describes the ‘solicitation
purr,’ a strategy simultaneously both powerful and seductive, insomuch as it
induces the pet owner to respond and attend to the cat, with either food or
affection. (507) This image might just
as easily be applied to a certain vision of human female manipulation, that is,
the figure of the calculating woman who is able to trick men into providing for them.

The famous solicitation purr:

MAN (besotted with his kitty): Your wish is my command.
CAT: And that's all there is?

One can only speculate on what might have been going through
Derrida’s mind the day of his cat confrontation. But given the self-conscious
attention he gives to his own nakedness, it is easy to imagine that from his
point of view the cat in question is staring
specifically at his penis, with a stare that apparently penetrates, all pun
intended. This moment turns on the privileging of not just his own manhood, but also
his appeal to the sense of sight, the
sense that many human animals value the most.But unlike human animals,most
other animals, like cats, and like dogs,
rely on multiple senses to ‘see,’
including hearing and tasting and touching, and perhaps most intensely the olfactory sense,
which is eminently far more developed than that of humans. Therefore, while
Derrida saw a cat looking at him, and
at his penis, in particular, as he notes, it’s also possible the cat was actually responding through a far more nuanced sensory
network and maybe even to a very
different set of stimuli.But by virtue
ofthe acutelyself-conscious attention his own nakedness, it’s
quite possible that the phallocentric
focus that Derrida himself rejects in his writings, is prompted, under the
cat’s feminizing stare, by a kind of unexpected ‘ca(t)s-stration’ anxiety that fills him not so much with shame
toward the ‘animal,’ as many have characterized this moment, but with terror of
the feminine. And that would be feminine ‘with a bite.’

The cat is not only a fully-equipped predator, but an obligate carnivore,
and anyone who’s been up close and
personal with a larger cat, like a lion or a tiger,[8]
has likely experienced the utter sense
of powerlessness in their presence when they look at you.Because, they are saying, in effect, I can eat
you. I can make you disappear. In
this way, could Derrida be imagining his
maleness all but disappearing, under the
female cat’s gaze? She looks, but does not confirm what he thinks she sees—his
humanness and his manhood. To take it a step further, perhaps he fears being consumed by her stare, triggering anxiety over
the devouring feminine.[9]
Instead of consumingan animal, he
risksbeing consumed.[10]

Another point to consider is that
the intensity of a cat stare can alsoeasily be misunderstood by someone who is unfamiliar with the underlying
physiology of the cat eye, or that, in fact,
cats do not blink as often as we do, even
though they actually see the world in softer focus.

"Who looks at whom?" (My now deceased cat Birdie)

Whiledogs seem to look at us, often trying
to read our faces, cats appear to see into
and through us. The structure of their eyes allows their stare to feel ‘fixed’
and for those it fixes on to feel like prey. The eyes of a cat are relatively
larger than those of human beings, andtypically protrude. Like other predators, cats’ eyes face forward in their
heads, and many cats have something called‘binocular vision,’ the ability for wide-angle vision, as well as
terrific peripheral vision. Though
dog stares can also be intense, recent research has indicated that dogs are the
only non-human animal (and that includes our primate cousins) whoshare with humans a ‘left-gaze bias.’
Therefore, a dog’s stare might more likely mirror familiar emotions like
devotion, curiosity,and a desire to
please.Unlike the cat’s, the adoring
gaze of a dog might also serve asa balm
for the ‘narcissistic wound.’

Whereas dogs and humans co-evolved, exerting relational exchanges on each
other in a mutual adaptation to social structures, as Haraway asserts in The Companion Species Manifesto, the cat
can be viewed as kind of solo architect, cleverly shaping and managing our responses to maintain control.

Consider for a moment if, instead of
Derrida’s cat who wandered into the bathroom that fateful day, it had been
Derrida’s dog (and here I will take the liberty of imagining one for him, a
medium-sized, flop-eared mixed-breed hound with soulful eyes and undying
loyalty, ever watchful in the hopes the slightest shift in his master’s body
language might signal that a treat or a walk is in store.) The sort of dog, who may not, in his clumsy way, always get things right, but at least generally makes the effort to
please.This is, in part, of course because
we humans have selectively bred and hard-wired dogs to do just that; over the centuries
we have manipulated their geneticsfor
shapes, size, and purpose which accounts for the fact that a chihauhau, a Great
Dane, and a husky all fit under the same rubric: dog.Loyal companion.Devoted friend. Obedient worker. No other
animal has been this genetically malleable, with such diverse phenotypic
results.

Butcats, those perfect predators and
obligate carnivores who have certainly
shared the company of human beings for centuries, demonstrate a very different historical co-evolution
with nonhuman animals, distinctly separate from that of dogs. In fact,
so-called domesticated cats, even the ones snoozing on our beds or winding
between our legs and purring, still retain, according to their human
companions, a predatory wildness that make them far more ‘other’ than dogs. This
is often part of the appeal, particularly as we are more and more removed from
wildlife.

So if that day, it had been Derrida’s amiable canid who ambled into the bathroom and caught a glimpse
of the fully monty, and that’s not just physically but psychically, as well, perhaps
we would never had had Derrida’s words on the subject of the animal. To the dog he might have
said, ‘good boy,’ the dog would have thumped his tail, and gazed back at him in
familiar and adoring affirmation, while Derrida toweled off and went on about his daily business. Instead, perhapswe
have that unabashed gaze of the Feminine
gazing on the biological evidence of his manhood to blame for throwing Derrida for a loop, a refusal to care about or confirm his maleness.

Since Derrida never reaches out, or touches the cat, nor otherwise engages with her body,
or she, his, his moment of ‘startle’
takes place strictly through the act of ‘looking,’ and further distances him from the cat as he enters into a cerebral meditation on otherness. Neither
does he fully credit the cat, for her ability to instruct him, and what animals actually have to teach us, a subject Eve Sedgwick
raises briefly in her essay, ‘Pedagogy of Buddhism’ from Touching Feeling. ‘What does it mean,’ she asks, ‘when cats bring small, wounded animals into
the house?’ She proceeds to muse that ‘
. . . people interpret these as offerings . . . to please or propitiate . . the
cats’ humans.’ (153) But, basing her observations on the work of anthropologist
Elizabeth Marshall Thompson who knows better, Sedgwick adds, ‘Where we had thought to be
powerful or admired, quasi-parental figures to our cats, we are cast instead
into the role of clumsy newborns requiring special education.’ (153)

In a piece otherwise undevoted to
cats, Sedgwick postulates that we humans do not want to learn the lesson the
cat is patiently trying toteach us--in
this case, how to hunt, but there are other lessons, as well, because what we
want is adulation, not instruction.Put another way, the cat offers us her skills as a corrective to human
failure, and for some of us, that’s a blow to our egos.[11]

Whatever you name it, Derrida’s ‘startle’ has to do, as he says, with ‘being looked at’ by a being he
acknowledges as unrecognizable, and yet who
exerts a special kind of power over him.Derrida is briefly confronted not only by his own animality but the
estrangement ofthe unmediated and
unmitigated feminine: predatory, instructive,seductive,defiant, and intimate,
and non-confirming.

The cat’s feminizing stare places Derrida in a destabilizing position that
undermines his masculinity, which mostly remains unquestioned throughout the
essay. Though Derrida refers to his cat
as his ‘primary mirror,’ he seems to see
mirrored back only a limited reflection, as through a glass darkly, one that
takes him only so far before returning him to himself.

In the reversed gaze, the power or
control belongs as Laura Mulvey might contend,to the spectator or, in this
case, the female cat, the one who does the looking.[12]In that act of being looked at, the object of the gaze internalizes ‘the gaze,’ leading to a
distorted sense of self, though the distortion
here signals for Derrida a revelation he
wasn’t quite sure what to do with. Certainly it is not a look of confirmation,
one that says, ‘Hello, there, you are Derrida, a man, a philosopher, and very
famous.’

Despite a chance to leap free of
inhibiting cultural and anthropocentric filters, and move toward a reciprocity
of subject and other, in all its multiple layers, Derrida fails to fully take
into account the significance of his cat’s gender or, in general, the cat’s long historic
association with the feminine. While some scholars suggest that Derrida experienced shame regarding his
own nudity with the cat acting as a kind
of prolapsarian Eve-in-the-garden-after-the-serpent moment, I strongly suspect otherwise;
that it was the collision with the unabashed feminine, an otherness even greater
than what he attempts to examine across the ‘animal/human’ divide.

And while certainly he deserves
credit for feeling shame over the unmitigated horrors of the human treatment of animals, to
which he generously refers, he never really strays that much beyond Bentham
himself in his conclusion that we should treat animals better. In addition, he
misses the gender boat altogether. The woman may have not been recognizable
because her form was not human. In addition, in Derrida’s stroll through the
literary and philosophic pantheon that he uses to support his meditation, the
presence of his female cat never triggers for him the recognition of a
collective tradition of women philosophers and thinkers, perhaps because he
simply doesn’t see (or hear) them. In
addition, by privileging sight, Derrida also misses the fact that the cat, this
very real, female cat would have also been smelling, and listening, all at
once. While he fixated on what he thought
he was seeing, his ‘not-a-metaphorical’ cat might well have been processing the momentthrough a complex lens of integrated sensory experience, of which
Derrida was only one factor. She might also have simply been hungry, and was
reminding him her bowl was empty. Though Derrida claims to perceive his cat in
that moment as serving as ‘my primary mirror,’ there is much he does not see.
Perhaps he was overwhelmed by a veritable hall of mirrors,reflecting back not just the multiple and
complex possibilities of Animal nature, but feminine, too, with both a small and capital ‘f.’ As the cat
seems to end up joining the general bestiary of suffering creatures, Derrida
concludes the essay with himself, with the question‘But, as for me, who am I (following)?’ I would suggest he is following
himself.

[1] By “animal people,” I refer to a broad range of
scholars, writers, thinkers, and activists who share deep concerns about our
human treatment of non-human animals, and generally ponder what it means to be
“animal.”

[2] Clearly, terms like “woman,” “female,” and “feminine”
signify a range of meanings, which this essay will not address.As opposed to interrupting my discussion
every step of the way to explain the use of the terms each time they appear, I
hope they are signifying more freely in
different contexts , and do not ever refer exclusively to “biologically-determined
women any more than “woman” presumes a category of “white Western woman”).

[3] In her wonderful essay, “Pussy Panic,” Susan Fraiman points
out: “If Derridean animal studies seems poised to corner the contemporary
market, I am troubled in part by its revisionary history--the way an origin
story beginning in 2002 serves to eclipse the body of animal scholarship . . .
[and] dozens of books going back some forty years long before Derrida’s essay
was brought to the attention of the English speakers.Much of this pioneering work was by women and
feminists--a significant portion under the rubic of ecofeminism--and all of it
arose in dialogue with late-centry liberation movements, including the
second-wave women’s movement.” (92)

[4] The “touch of my own glance,” though a translation,
is a lovely linguistic gesture toward honoring the multiple senses involved in
exchanges with the bodies of others.

[5] Derrida also quotes some of the same material from Buber
in his essay, though I have chosen to cite the original source.

[6] Derrida includes no references to anything outside a
predominantly male Western canon.

[7]The now well-accepted link between domestic violence and animal abuse
is worth mentioning here, particularly since household pets and other animals often become “stand-in’s” for the human (usually
a woman, and possibly her children, too). According to the ASPCA, abusers
typically batter animals to exercise control, enforce submission, punish
independence, and isolate the victim and her children. http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/domestic-violence-and-animal-cruelty.aspx.Randall Lockwood’s study on the subject
indicates that cats are killed at higher rates than dogs, both in situations of
abuse and hoarding cases.

[8] At the nearby Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Center
Point, IN, a legitimate sanctuary for abused and neglected captive “big cats,”
I have experienced being “hunted” by a cougar, with just a chain-link fence
between us. It was both thrilling and terrifying--the enormous power and
beauty.

[9] Though “vagina dentata” is a very real, if even rare,
condition in human woman, it was difficult not to imagine the carnivorous cat
operating as a symbol of castration terror.

[10] Derrida is considering what Westerners conceive of as
a “companion animal,” not a farmed
animal, intended for consumption; had he been looking instead into the eyes of
a pig or a cow or a chicken, that is, an animal that might end up on his dinner
plate, where might his meditations have led him?

[11] With animals that we consume, it is even more
important to maintain the bright-line borders in order to justify human domination and exploitation.